NMC Campus Observer

Teachers Buzz From Eyefood

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Mar 5, 2007 02:51pm

We had a fabulous meeting today for the NMC Campus teacher’s Buzz Session, thanks to our host Kisa Naumova, who invited us to her eyefood gallery on Steiger. The goal was to demo and talk about integration of web content into (and out from) Second Life. We had a nice crowd, including some experiences Sl scripters and gadget makers. A full meeting transcript is available.

Things may have looked a little shaky when the flickr screen demo did not seem to work (be sure to watch the demo video)…. just keep in mind that this is some experimental stuff (and besides flickr still labels itself “beta” or “gamma”…), but things kep moving as we talked about the capabilities of the Linden Scriptiing Language (LSL):

The thing that I’ve found though is that the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) isn’t all that extensive when it comes to sending information in and out of SL. The command I use the most, I guess llHTTPRequest which lets you communicated with external web servers and web services. But the size of the response is quite small. So, to really get a decent bit of 3D/2D web integration going on, it’s really useful to be able to tie scripts into some of the “Web 2.0″ APIs that are springing up all over the place.

We did hear about using scripts to send messages from SL to the new, hot social networking site Twitter, that allows groups of people to mroe or less post quick updates about what they are doing, thinking abut etc. See Kisa’s Twitter for a sample. Learn more and get a copy of the script.

Lastly, we saw an amazing demo of applying QuickTime content (technically SMIL format multimedia) to prims in Second Life, so that images could be dynamically loaded from external sources. The images we saw were loaded from Kisa’s Sleeds web site, which could then be accessed by clicking prims in SL:

It was pretty exciting to see it in action (and again, as the sim got really-slowed-down and almost-crashed!)

Learn more (a lot more if you want the technical details) from Kisa’s post on Rich-Media Delivery In Second Life — A HOWTO. Thanks again to Kisa and the crowd that showed up for another great discussion.

Story filed under: Teacher's Buzz

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)